Previously, collaboration over long distances entailed either significant delay or great costs. Collaboration by postal mail correspondence has long been available. However, this collaboration had to adapt itself to delays of several days or weeks between individual interactions. Long distance telephone calls were also used, but until recently considered expensive and because of this cost unsuited to routine collaboration. With the advancement of technology, interactive and synchronous multimedia interactions are now routinely possible over the Internet at minimal cost. With these developments, the ‘death of distance’ was proclaimed with world wide collaborations now possible with minimal expense and supposedly minimal inconvenience.
The inconvenience of such long distance collaborations nevertheless has moved from the cost and difficulty in creating connections to the realization that the world is round and people live long distances apart as such live in different time zones and have different customs. The same physical universal time of day can find people in Europe and North America in entirely different portions of their daily activities and social expectations. Collaborations between people in Paris and Los Angeles therefore have to take into account that these locations are in time zones that are eight hours apart. As such, someone just arriving at work at 9:00 AM in Los Angeles will discover that a potential collaborator in Paris is about to leave work at 5:00 PM. Since their business days overlap only slightly, the possibility of unplanned spontaneous interactions is greatly diminished compared to collaborators who live in the same time zone.
Today, these issues are only made worse by the provision of personal devices and ‘one number’ services that can find a person no matter where they are. Such devices and services have led to the development of mobile workers who are always in touch with their office and collaborators. Mobile workers with long distance air travel can move from time zone to time zone very quickly. For example, someone in Los Angeles can make a routine call to someone that they believe is in the same city only to discover that their colleague is in Paris where it is 11:00 PM.
It would thus be desirable to provide applications which are sensitive to the differences in expectations and acceptable behavior between time zones. Customarily, it would be unacceptable to call someone at 11:00 PM or later on a business matter except in the most urgent of situations. Current systems can cause this to be done inadvertently. Applications to enable users to be sensitive to other relative time zones are then clearly desirable. As well, it would be desirable if these applications did not require overt action by a caller since it would routinely be neglected.
In addition to those reasons presented above, the time that a call has been made can be used to judge its relative importance. For example, a call that is received at 11:00 PM local time would be considered to be very important. However, if the call is received at 3:00 PM local time, then this indication of importance can be lost. The present application will address this problem of user and machine collaboration across time zones.